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Solidarity against online harassment

One of our colleagues has been the target of a sustained campaign of harassment for the past several months. We have decided to publish this statement to publicly declare our support for her, for every member of our organization, and for every member of our community who experiences this harassment. She is not alone and her experience has catalyzed us to action. This statement is a start.

The Tor Project works to create ways to bypass censorship and ensure anonymity on the Internet. Our software is used by journalists, human rights defenders, members of law enforcement, diplomatic officials, and many others. We do high-profile work, and over the past years, many of us have been the targets of online harassment. The current incidents come at a time when suspicion, slander, and threats are endemic to the online world. They create an environment where the malicious feel safe and the misguided feel justified in striking out online with a thousand blows. Under such attacks, many people have suffered — especially women who speak up online. Women who work on Tor are targeted, degraded, minimized and endure serious, frightening threats.

This is the status quo for a large part of the internet. We will not accept it.

We work on anonymity technology because we believe in empowering people. This empowerment is the beginning and a means, not the end of the discussion. Each person who has power to speak freely on the net also has the power to hurt and harm. Merely because one is free to say a thing does not mean that it should be tolerated or considered reasonable. Our commitment to building and promoting strong anonymity technology is absolute. We have decided that it is not enough for us to work to protect the world from snoops and censors; we must also stand up to protect one another from harassment.

It's true that we ourselves are far from perfect. Some of us have written thoughtless things about members of our own community, have judged prematurely, or conflated an idea we hated with the person holding it. Therefore, in categorically condemning the urge to harass, we mean categorically: we will neither tolerate it in others, nor will we accept it among ourselves. We are dedicated to both protecting our employees and colleagues from violence, and trying to foster more positive and mindful behavior online ourselves.

Further, we will no longer hold back out of fear or uncertainty from an opportunity to defend a member of our community online. We write tools to provide online freedom but we don't endorse online or offline abuse. Similarly, in the offline world, we support freedom of speech but we oppose the abuse and harassment of women and others. We know that online harassment is one small piece of the larger struggle that women, people of color, and others face against sexism, racism, homophobia and other bigotry.

This declaration is not the last word, but a beginning: We will not tolerate harassment of our people. We are working within our community to devise ways to concretely support people who suffer from online harassment; this statement is part of that discussion. We hope it will contribute to the larger public conversation about online harassment and we encourage other organizations to sign on to it or write one of their own.

FYI: I have copied and pasted above a Link to an alleged "Start Page" Request that I have recently started receiving periodically, asking me to enter a CAPTCHA CODE to "verify" who I am...which I now think is "Spoofing" of my particular personal desktop computer, rather than "spoofing" of the Tor Network itself...but in case I am wrong about this, I thought I should alert the Tor Community to this "dynamic"...

(When it first happened, I had to enter a CAPTCHA Code for every single Search I did that day -- which quickly alerted me to the fact that this was "wrong wrong wrong"...I now simply close out my Tor link whenever this happens and/or delete and re-download Tor...)

I am female and the subject of ongoing harrassment -- along with other members of my family -- to the point where I had to physically relocate from one area of the country to another...

Not all search services will allow anonymous search for forever(Startpage may revolt and start punishing Tor users. Google may temporarily be friendly to Tor searches then start blocking them, Bing may suddenly start becoming friendly to Tor users searching, then it might stop being friendly. http://search.yacy.de/ may now be friendly to Tor. One day they may not.). After you re-download Tor Browser Bundle turn off JavaScript the first thing you do. Having JavaScript on is like "putting your fingers on the site so they can check your fingerprints". Turning off JavaScript doesn't let your fingers leave those fingerprints in the first place.
I can't tell if your solution is a bad idea. Better be safe than sorry, it's a personal choice what you do.

Good point. I think everybody who signed onto it would be happy to expand the set of minorities that it talks about.

I'm really hoping this will turn into a larger group of people talking about the bigger issues -- and to make that work you're right that we're going to have to embrace even more diversity and even more differences.

Pretty sure anon means that you only specifying women and minorities can imply that harassing, say, white men would be acceptable. You should fix the post to say that harassment of anyone, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, is unacceptable. Else you're just going to be a magnet for criticism.

I am a white male, and one of the people on this support list doxxed my entire family down to SSN and street address!

You have one "Rachel Haywire" aka Rachel Ellen Mendelson listed as one of your supporters. This woman has doxed my entire family, down to social security numbers and street address. And she is currently under investigation for burning (ie deliberate ARSON) the very address she made public threats regarding.

You are right. we should be against any form of harassment (and also supporters of free speech which is no contradiction) - but you are missing the point.
"We know that online harassment is one small piece of the larger struggle that women, people of color, and others face against sexism, racism, homophobia and other bigotry. "
Is there a lot of harassment against women in the scene mentioned? yes
Can we find a lot homophobia ? Yes

Should we therefore stand up again the harassment against say rich heterosexual white men? No

In my opinion we have to fight the struggles of the society that we live in.

And there you fell into the logic trap "*rich* heterosexual white men".

Since when has every hetero white male been rich, successful and generally immune to woes and worries of life?

As I fall into the category of hetero white male, why should I support any initative worded in this way? Almost all organisations, statements, missions and initiatives choose to support "minorities" and expressly not me or mine. In fact any positive selection bias for a minory directly means I'm being targeted.

I've been the subject of extensive bullying and my eldest son experienced some truely horrific cyber-bullying prior to his suicide.

He wasn't gay, female, black, trans, or any other supported minority and guess what? There was little to no support because he wasn't in a minority group; we were treated as if our accident of birth somehow gave us an amazingly ability to simply not be affected due to an offset held "in general by being a hetero-white male".

Either we stand against harassment in its entirety and present truely integrated response that is blind to sexuality, race, gender, and other -isms or you are still perpetuating that we are not all humans together without divide.

And you “conveniently” miss the point in your reply by deliberately reinterpreting what was stated in an attempt to prove your own agenda.

It was specifically called out as “positive bias” as the problem and you change this to be “any attempt” in order to discredit the experience and opinion without addressing the underlying issue.

Exhibit a negative bias towards a minority set in any group and it will be quite rightly called out as homophobic, racist, sexist, pick as appropriate; everybody agrees that this is not the “done thing”. To not assist somebody because of their you are creating a negative bias against individuals because of positive bias for a sub-set of the remainder of the population.

The linguistic fallacy committed in your reply leaves you making a heterophobic, sexist, and racist comment, but I’m guessing you either do not see/recognise it or feel its fair game because the poster has identified themselves from a different group to yourself.

Let me also point-out that white heterosexual males (at least those who don't apologize for who they are) are not the only category that falls outside of the favor and protection of prevailing politically and socially correct orthodoxy. Homosexuals who reject the entrenched culture and approved positions of the "Gay" or "LGTBQ" community are also met with much hostility, rejection and even vitriol and abuse.

More on this can be found at any number of dissident pro-homoerotic sites on the web. (Many should come-up with a search for the term frot, the safe, egalitarian, dignified, painless form of male homosexual intercourse that is advocated by many such dissidents.)

If you only fight against harassment against certain groups you're not really against harassment. You're for protecting certain groups. And that's a very noble cause and one I personally wish you the best of luck with. But if you think you can fix the specific problem of online harassment by only dealing with it when it affects certain people you'll never really succeed. All you're doing is patching up damage. That's a notable cause but not helping in the long run. Men are harassed the same reason women are. Whites are harassed the same reason Asians, blacks, or any other group is. Because people are assholes. Whatever solution we come up with to stop online harassment needs to work for everybody or it won't really work for anybody.

Tor Developers, you want this blog post to start a discussion of bigger issues than just the particular case of your own developer being harassed. A agree completely. You'll know best how Tor can be exploited for harassment. You can help deal with the technical aspects and those don't discriminate between targets. We can't stop Tor from being used for bad things. But we can help all people defend against them efficiently.

No it doesn't. Saying "we are against harrassment of women in minorities" IN NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM can be read as "but harrassment of cis white hetero men is fine". Not unless you are an idiot. Being against one thing cannot be read as being for its opposite. This is the kind of petty horseshit that drags discussion down. The English language means things, and if you claim someone supports majority harrassment merely by opposing minority harrassment that says more about you than about the speaker.

So, if I wrote an article about protecting straight, white males, only idiots would call me mysogynistic/racist/homophobic because of it?
Because if you truly believe that, you must think we have a lot of idiots around.

These are young techie libs with lib education that do not have historical fact from before the 1960's when education created scientist and engineers based on facts and rewarded hard work. So do not expect too much just take tech stuff and apply to your own apps. We whites are done in US so follow mideast developments and if and when a safe opening for work/living take it. ISIL wasted any religious connection with the west so there is no Hollywood effec but mideast can be a self-contained commonwealth when religious ISLAM focuses on development instead of self destructive fanatics wasting manpower but the feminist and gay problem is taken care of. Plus some alliance between the Semites is foretold untrusted but still aligned. And orthodox Christian and Jews just pay the unbeliever tax.

Least we forget. True freedom of speech means taking the good with the bad. It means we must hear the voices of those with whom we may not agree. It means we must give everyone a voice to be heard.

Having said and keeping in mind the above, this doesn't mean we must allow those who seek only to denigrate and belittle or threaten a voice to spread their hate. Freedoms come with responsibilities. Anonymity is not a veil to hide behind while seeking to spread hate, fear, abusiveness, intolerance, and fear. It is a means to give a voice to those who want to speak their minds. To speak out from positions of possible retribution for revealing truths that could get people hurt for speaking out on them. It provides a route for making known information we all need.

I think this is the crux of the matter concerning anonymity in general and specifically. There is no (or should not be) debate that freedom of speech should be protected vigorously and without restraint.....up to the point that it should also be respective of others rights and be done responsibly. We fear to speak out a lot of times due to the repercussions from those who do not want a particular truth brought to light. Those who abuse this freedom are not worthy of being protected.

I think everybody who signed onto it would be happy to expand the set of minorities that it talks about. [emphasis mine-anon]

I see, so only "minorities" are worthy of being protected from harrassment or having a stand taken against harrassment of them. Anyone not in a category that enjoys protected minority status is fair game.

That sentence of yours was more revealing than I think you ever even began to realize. (And will remain so regardless of how you may attempt to backpedal from it.)

Unfortunately, no. As much as I'd love GamerGate to be the cause of harassment (because that would mean it's a tiny, tiny fringe of the online world that just started last august), no harasser, troll or any other bad people has ever waited until August 2014 to be a bad person.
Anita Sarkeesian has been routinely harassed and threatened since as far back as 2012, two years before GamerGate came to existence. And don't get me wrong it's absolutely awful and I'm glad the Tor community condemns strongly this kind of abuse. But it proves how unrelated to GamerGate these behaviours are.

There certainly is many harassers inside GamerGate, it would be delusional to deny it. But neither is this what GamerGate is about at its core, nor has any of those harassers waited for GamerGate to harass anyone they don't like.

GamerGate is not a harassment campaign. Neither it is a movement "for ethics in video games" to be honest. The best way to describe it is to call them a movement fighting against a far-left community (of indie developers and video games journalists) pushing for radical liberal changes of behaviours in the video games industry. A far-left community which hasn't been absolutely clean either regarding online harassment, by the way.

Stupid people are stupid regardless of the movement they associate with. Regarding online harrasment of women in particular, it was ongoing long before GamerGate started and will continue long after GamerGate dies. That's a sad thing to say, but it's a fact.

Disagreed (I'm the Anon who wrote the piece you just answered by the way). I am European, I usually vote for center-left parties (except for the latest EU elections, I voted Pirates), and the people I see GamerGate fighting against are borderline too far-left even for parties such as Die Linke, Parti de Gauche or Podemos. It may be close to the ideas of Vänsterpartiet and/or Feminist Initiativ in Sweden but with more sectarism.

To give you an idea of how unsimilar it is to European center parties, these people (the targets of Gamergate) are also the ones who wrote pieces of news such as “I don’t care if you landed a spacecraft on a comet, your shirt is sexist and ostracizing.” (you may have heard of it - if not : one of the guys in charge of the Rosetta/Philae mission was bullied and shamed to tears by those people for wearing a shirt that depicted women hodling big guns and being arguably scantily clothed).
I have yet to see any center party in Europe shaming a scientist because his shirt was "too sexist". Actually, most European leftist to far-left feminists I know found that - this time - it was going too far. Probably because Europe is less prude and anti-sex than the US are.

Basically, from what I've seen (I've lurked a lot in both "parties" main gathering places), GamerGate is basically a backlash against those radical feminists and their close allies trying to push their agenda in the gaming community. This plus the gaming community having a strong habit of overreacting.
This is not a far-right vs moderate battle, even by European standards. More of a battle between moderately conservatives vs. far-left radicals.

There certainly are many trolls who took part in the movement and harassed women (and men too by the way - Phil Fish and Jonathan McIntosh both have it rough too) : GamerGate gave them visibility and an opportunity. But it's neither the goal nor the majority of the movement. It's just that these kind of despicable people will seek any opportunity to further their despicable actions, as this very blog post we are commenting on unfortunately proves.

The bottom line is that GamerGate is certainly not what the medias depicted (the "misogynists harassers" story is mostly bullsh*t)... nor is it what the GamerGaters claim they are (the "ethics in video games" story is equally bullsh*tty). It's a political battle between two opposed political sides, both claiming their view is the only good video games community, both claiming anyone who disagrees with their side is the "ennemy", and both competing for the title of "biggest victim of harassers from the other side". The difference is that one side has access to the media to have their version of the story covered (as many people of their side are journalists) while the other does not.

"The bottom line is that x is certainly not what the medias depicted" -- I bet we can all agree on that, for pretty much all values of x.

And, with this I'm going to cut off the Gamergate discussions here, since there are other forums for arguing about Gamergate, and while it's related to a bunch of people here deciding and pledging to stop passively ignoring harassment online, I don't see how turning this into a Gamergate discussion is going to help in any way.

Recent Updates

Hi! There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.3.3.2-alpha from the usual place on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release some time in February.

Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.

Tor 0.3.3.2-alpha is the second alpha in the 0.3.3.x series. It introduces a mechanism to handle the high loads that many relay operators have been reporting recently. It also fixes several bugs in older releases. If this new code proves reliable, we plan to backport it to older supported release series.

Changes in version 0.3.3.2-alpha - 2018-02-10

Major features (denial-of-service mitigation):

Give relays some defenses against the recent network overload. We start with three defenses (default parameters in parentheses). First: if a single client address makes too many concurrent connections (>100), hang up on further connections. Second: if a single client address makes circuits too quickly (more than 3 per second, with an allowed burst of 90) while also having too many connections open (3), refuse new create cells for the next while (1-2 hours). Third: if a client asks to establish a rendezvous point to you directly, ignore the request. These defenses can be manually controlled by new torrc options, but relays will also take guidance from consensus parameters, so there's no need to configure anything manually. Implements ticket 24902.

Major bugfixes (netflow padding):

Stop adding unneeded channel padding right after we finish flushing to a connection that has been trying to flush for many seconds. Instead, treat all partial or complete flushes as activity on the channel, which will defer the time until we need to add padding. This fix should resolve confusing and scary log messages like "Channel padding timeout scheduled 221453ms in the past." Fixes bug 22212; bugfix on 0.3.1.1-alpha.